


we could waste the night

by ilgaksu



Category: Persona 3, Persona Series
Genre: Coma, F/F, F/M, M/M, Multi, Other, Panic Attacks, Polyamory, Post-Canon, Shinjiro Lives
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-16
Updated: 2016-06-16
Packaged: 2018-07-15 11:22:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7220350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilgaksu/pseuds/ilgaksu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They are all strangers in a strange land, but they have been that for a long time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we could waste the night

**16 November 2011**

_(WEDS / Waning Gibbous)_

The first time Shinjiro opens his eyes in two years, there is no one there to notice. Call it a metaphor. Call it a coincidence. Call it what you want. It's 3am here in the hospital but not elsewhere, the Equator Line a more benevolent Dark Hour of misplaced time.

In Paris, Mitsuru Kirijo signs declarations of war in the guise of contracts and in Los Angeles Junpei Iori is skyping his girlfriend from a locker room, wiping the sweat from his face with his shirt and he is laughing, Mitsuru is pouring another cup of coffee down her throat. Fuuka Yamagishi is the closest in Hong Kong, blueprints spread over the tiny apartment floor and a beautiful chrome kitchen that is never clean and a habit of making twice the portions, as though to share. She feeds banana cupcakes to Koro-chan and he sleeps with one eye open at the foot of her bed. Yukari Takeba has never stopped travelling, the endless stream of photographed, filtered skylines pastelised to hide her father's shadow in her eyes: he's followed her across that Equator Line and she's running out of land.

Ken Amada walks into a prep school in Cambridge, England and says, "Hello, it's nice to meet you," with the smile that he practised in the mirror for three days; Junpei blows a kiss and shuts the laptop on Chidori in her Tokyo studio; Mitsuru pours a fourth cup of coffee and Akihiko runs through the morning in Seoul, a city where nothing has ever caught fire except for him.

They are all strangers in a strange land, but they have been that for a long time.

When Shinjiro opens his eyes, you could say it's overdue, but you could say a lot of things about Shinjiro. So call it whatever. Call it whatever you fucking want.

**21st December 2011**

**(WEDS / Waning Crescent)**

The second time Shinjiro opens his eyes, there is a nurse changing his feeding tubes. She is new and green and hits a button to summon the doctor immediately as Shinjiro stares at her, calm and stony. His eyes remain open for minutes rather than seconds.

“He’s looking at me,” she says, and the doctor smiles at her and says:

“That happens sometimes. They settle eventually,” and sure enough, Shinjiro closes his eyes. His breathing never changes throughout, slow and steady as blood, as heartbeat, as bone: the components of a fairytale come alive.

**3rd January 2012**

**(TUES / Waxing Gibbous)**

Like all good resurrection stories, third time’s the charm. This time he opens his eyes and curls his fingers around the hand of the doctor checking his pulse, in front of a bevy of medical students. That sure gets their attention. Shinjiro Aragaki, who is nearly twenty two and hated charity, has no next of kin listed, so they ring the Kirijo Group, who pay for his private room and his breathing machine, and ask for permission to carry out some more brain scans.

Mid-afternoon in an Art Deco pied-a-terre, the phone rings.

“Don’t worry, Aigis,” Mitsuru says, kissing her on the cheek as she leans over the arm of the sofa, “I’ll take it.”

She books the next flight out whilst still on her phone. Aigis gets the bags.

**4th January 2012**

**(WEDS / Waxing Gibbous)**

Aigis loves flying like she loves all machines; that is to say, as kin. She reminds Mitsuru of the take-off procedure from an engineering standpoint with delight as Mitsuru accepts the complimentary rum and coke and smiles apologetically at the nervous-looking first-time flyer directly across for Aigis’ exacting monologue.

“Holiday?” she asks them, and they nod, anxious. Mitsuru smiles the smile that she devoted years to learning: the smile that says _everything is under control._

“What about you and your friend?” they ask.

“Girlfriend,” Mitsuru corrects on automatic, and then glances down at her manicure to avoid having to maintain the level of eye contact she has always been asked to aspire to. It is the perfect shade of chocolate, sleek and forgiving against her cashmere trousers. “We’re visiting family.”

She doesn’t ring Akihiko yet. Texting seems too abrupt, too cruel, and they have loved each other through enough to give each other the courtesy of their full attention when life and death are on the cards. There is always video call, but she doesn’t want to see his expression as he tries to reabsorb the upchuck of hope. They are survivors; he does not believe in second chances, and honestly? Mitsuru Kirijo has never been as brave as anyone expects her to be.

“Shall I contact Yukari?” Aigis asks, tapping away at her tablet with efficient grace, leant forward so the weight of her synthetic hair, now long and long replaced, swings forward in a braid.

On the note of bravery. Mitsuru feels her mouth twist. Aigis places a careful hand on her forearm.

“No,” Mitsuru says finally, as the plane taxies down the runway, “Leave Takeba to me.”

*

“Why are you telling me this, Mitsuru?” Yukari says, which is to say she means _why are you ringing me for the first time in six months, Mitsuru?_ There is no honorific anymore when Yukari talks. Mitsuru isn’t sure if she misses it. Mitsuru isn’t sure of a lot around Yukari, except that the word _miss_ is the right word; they missed each other in high school, and they keep doing it now.

“I thought you’d want to know,” she says. “You showed some distress at Shinjiro’s situation previously.”

“Blood on the ground does that to you,” Yukari says acidly. “I’m not in that place anymore.”

“I know.”

Wherever it is, whatever place she has made it to, there is traffic outside, and people singing. Mitsuru thinks it is in Spanish, but she can’t tell. Madrid, perhaps? Yukari was so close and for how long? This thought skirts too near to the bone, so Mitsuru steers the conversation back.

“Do you remember,” Mitsuru says, “how it felt after each full moon?” How it felt to be part of something, she means, like organs in one body, all keeping each other alive. All she can hear is the Spanish (not-Spanish?) and Yukari’s soft breathing. “He cooked us dinner once,” she tries, as though that can encompass it all: the way laughter did not catch in their lungs, for one.

“And you’re calling in the bill for it two years down the line,” Yukari says, “What are you, his debt collector?”

When Mitsuru was seventeen, she saw Akihiko and Shinjiro fighting on the second floor landing. This was not uncommon. She paused on the stairs to figure out a graceful entrance into the scene, taking it in. Akihiko, stocky, jaw set, his eyes and hair glinting in the dark of Shinjiro’s shadow; Shinjiro, taller, lankier, head tilted to the side and his hair brushing his collar, the only soft thing in his silhouette.

“Don’t you,” Akihiko had said, and Shinjiro had swooped on him, turning his face away from Shinjiro’s hand, “come over here now, fucker, I can smell the smoke on you, you know that shit kills you, they put it on the packets in big letters so even you can get the message -”

“You’re such a fuckin’ crybaby, Aki,” Shinjiro had murmured and then, “we’re not something you gotta wait to fall around you,” and Akihiko had looked at him with eyes light as ash and said nothing.

Mitsuru says nothing to Yukari now, just waits. Finally, Yukari sighs.

“I’ll see what I can do,” she says, "Don't expect anything," and hangs up.

"I never do," Mitsuru lies to the dial tone. 

**7th January 2012**

**(SAT / Waxing Gibbous)**

Yamagishi is waiting for them at the airport. Her hair is a pixie cut now, cropped close around her ears, and she wears no jewellery but a watch. She walks towards them, bare-faced and light-footed in cropped trousers and a scarf, Koro-chan dwarfing her. Mitsuru wants to hug her, and when she does, Yamagishi’s hair smells of baby shampoo.

“How is university?” Mitsuru asks Yamagishi once they’re in the car. Aigis drives, her eyes steadfast on the road as she concentrates. Mitsuru feels a familiar ache in her chest watching the soft frown on Aigis’ face. She winces at her own question, but Yamagishi is smiling enthusiastically, leaning forward. Her chatter about professors and projects fills the increasing emptiness that rises in Mitsuru as they travel further into the town. The flower shop outside Port Island Station is gone.

Mitsuru really should ring Akihiko. She asks Yamagishi about a planned trip to Shenzhen with Natsuki instead.

“When is Akihiko-senpai getting here?” Yamagishi asks. She tries not to sound excited, but a high-school crush bleeds through into her voice all the same. Mitsuru suppresses a wince.

“Mitsuru has not contacted Akihiko yet,” Aigis states, eyes on the road, and Yamagishi is not good at suppression.

“Weren’t they -” she says.

“Yes,” Mitsuru replies. She taps her nails against the window. “How do you tell someone that?”

“Quickly,” Yamagishi says, “and all at once,” and when they get to the hotel, Mitsuru finally rings Seoul.

*

She drops it like a bomb; it seems fitting; Akihiko Sanada has always seemed made of shrapnel. That is to say, small flinty pieces with a thousand weak spots. She has known men with shrapnel in their chests since childhood; it surprises her that she fell in love with one. Familiarity for Mitsuru has so often bred contempt. And Akihiko is familiar. She knows him in a way that cannot be unknown and that is why she didn’t want to call and tell him that the angry angular boy he’d wept blood for in a hospital is showing signs of high-level brain activity.

After she tells him the prognosis, matter of fact, Akihiko hangs up and then immediately calls back. She knows him, so she waits for her ringtone.

“Tell me what to do,” he says, and it sounds all practicality, the way hitting someone with your fists is an excursion in practicality, but she hears the underlying cadence: _I don’t know what to do._ It surprises her that she fell in love with Akihiko Sanada, but not as much as it used to. They are not cut from the same cloth, but Mitsuru sometimes think it was the same seamstress with the same pair of scissors. And men with shrapnel in their chests always want to believe they can be made whole.

“There’s a flight out of Incheon tonight,” she says, “You have five hours.”

“Alright,” he says, and she can hear the shudder of relief in his voice. “What are we waiting for?”

“You,” she says, and he laughs. The hitch in it is a seam being ripped out. She puts the phone on speaker and listens to him pack.

“Do your breathing,” she says automatically.

“I’m always breathing.”

“Don’t make me tell you again,” she says, and waits until his breathing is controlled and even, a perfect how-to of how to stave off a panic attack, and stays on the phone until the taxi she’d booked arrives at his door.

**8th January 2012**

**(SUN / Full Moon)**

“They’ve looked into a new experimental treatment,” Mitsuru says the minute Akihiko steps into Arrivals. Aigis is waiting in the car at Mitsuru’s request, and so Mitsuru is carrying her tablet by herself, the flicker of her archived notes to avoid the flicker of Akihiko’s eyes. She doesn’t look at him. She can’t. “They’re going to stimulate his brainwaves in increments in order to try and bring him around. There’s no evidence of it working on a macro level, but there are instances. I looked into it and it seems legit based on some medical journals, so I gave them the go ahead -” She dislikes the font on this application. Why hasn’t she ever changed it from the default? Why hasn’t she ever changed?

Akihiko crashes into her and the world stills.

She is faintly aware of the cluster of bags dropped at their feet, of strangers looking at them and away, of Akihiko’s face tucked against her neck, the faint scrape of stubble and the hitch in his breathing that is not a prerequisite for tears but is a marking point for them.

“Akihiko,” she says softly, and the hand that isn’t holding the tablet goes up to the back of his head.  She wonders who did this to them, who made them into these trembling, fresh-forged adults, tripping on their coltish legs and calling it running; whether it was Tartarus or Kirijo or the fire, or whether is was simply a necessary transmutation process that felt like an abattoir but was required to keep on living.

“Don’t you cry too,” Akihiko says finally, lowly, pulling back and rubbing his thumbs under her eyes. It’s clumsy and inexpert and probably smudges her makeup. She allows it. She hadn’t even realised she was. She looks at him because for many reasons he is the closest thing to a mirror for her some days. It’s difficult to mark the changes in him that were a slow progression for her, but she imagines them through Shinjiro’s eyes and they leap out: the scar across one eyebrow that slowly healed to a pale sickle of memory. The last of the baby fat gone. His hair cropped shorter. The burn-and-gravel scars on his arms ever older, like a new yen coin worn down by touch into dull metal. When she kisses him, it’s familiar. He tastes like cheap airport coffee. His jacket is slick and polyester beneath her fingertips when she moves her hands to his shoulders.

“We really have to get you some better clothes,” is all she says, “Have you eaten?” and waits for him to pick up his bags once more in one arm. With the hand not holding the tablet, she takes his.

*

When Aigis stops the car outside the dormitory, Akihiko turns to her and raises his eyebrows.

“We still own the building,” Mitsuru explains. She means the Kirijo Group, at least on some level; but somewhere else, the idea of this dormitory as theirs sunk down bone-deep and claimed her.

“Of course,” Akihiko says, his eyes leaden, looking at the building. “This fucking town,” he adds, half under his breath, mostly angry, a little sad. He gets out of the car with a movement that, if silhouetted, would’ve been a cut-out of Shinjiro’s tense shoulders. Unlike Shinjiro, he doesn’t slam the door. Mitsuru goes to follow him, but Aigis leans over and puts her hand on Mitsuru’s and Mitsuru stills.

“Mitsuru,” Aigis says, “This is not our worst mission.”  

She leans across and kisses Mitsuru’s forehead, soft as benediction, soft as crushed flowers, something small and safe. Mitsuru nods, and picks up her obnoxiously sleek leather bag, and opens the car door.

Inside, all the dust has been cleared away; Mitsuru had seen to that. The cupboards are stocked with food. Akihiko goes towards the stairs to drop his bags and is interrupted by Junpei, who leaps over the back of the old sofa in the lounge, feet skidding a little on the old carpet.

“Great to see you, man,” Junpei says, and tackles Akihiko into a hug. Junpei wouldn’t have been so easy with that two years ago. Chidori and the Americans have been good for him. “Jeez, you’ve bulked up, ain’t ya? You tired after the flight? I’m making coffee, and it’s the fucking bomb dot com -”

The bowspring of Akihiko’s body loosens under Junpei’s chatter, constant and inconsequential as white noise. Junpei steers Akihiko to the sofa, still talking about red-eyes and Los Angeles airport and his belt buckle setting off security, and Mitsuru wonders for how long Junpei has been doing this: talking over the silence so no one would have to hear it. Junpei grins at her when Akihiko gets up to head to the kitchen, gives her a thumbs up, his teeth stark against the new tan.

“How’s Chidori?” she asks him, and Junpei laughs a little awkwardly, looking down at the floor and scuffing the lino with the toe of his Converse.

“I think I’m gonna,” he says, “I think I’m gonna ask her to marry me one of these days.”

“Oh,” Mitsuru says, momentarily blank with surprise. “That’s something.”

Mitsuru made her mind up long ago that they’d never get her in a white dress, but idea of it happening to someone else is still quite sweet.

“Yeah, well,” he says, voice a bit hushed, glancing over his shoulder to where Akihiko is rifling through the kitchen cupboards and mixing several energy drinks together, “I feel like - you don’t always get a second chance you know? We got lucky.”

For a brief moment, they both know the other is thinking of Arisato.

“Yes,” Mitsuru says, voice a bit husky on the consonants. She watches Akihiko drain his glass, leave it on the side, and head upstairs towards Shinjiro’s room. She lets him be. There is a lot to process. Junpei is still looking at her, with an unsettling glint of understanding. She clears her throat. “Yes. Yes, Iori. Quite.”

*

“Were the beds always this uncomfortable?” Akihiko asks. Mitsuru looks up to see him in the doorway of her old bedroom. The dust is gone, but there’s still a smell of must; she hung up all her clothes hours ago and settled in with her laptop, checking emails and reading articles. His eyes are red, but he otherwise seems fine. He’s even smirking.

“Yes,” Mitsuru immediately replies, and the smirk widens. He raps his knuckles against the doorframe.

“Can I come in?”

“I don’t know,” Mitsuru says, “Can you?” and he rolls his eyes.

“This, again?”

“This always.”

“ _May_ I?” he says, and for a moment, Mitsuru remembers Shinjiro, remembers how he’d have kept his hands in his pockets, his well-rehearsed eyeroll, his _may I, princess?_ For a second, it consumes her.

Mitsuru has always told herself her grief for Aragaki Shinjiro was in the abstract.

“Come here,” she says, and moves her print-outs, her laptop, her fortress of papercuts and megabytes, moves it to the side to make room for Akihiko on the bed. It’s an awkward fit; she has always been tall, Akihiko is small but with broad shoulders, but they did this through the best-worst years of their lives so they know they drill. Akihiko tucks his head under Mitsuru’s chin and curls his arm around Mitsuru’s waist, and they lie there looking at each other silently for a long time. Neither of them have the energy for anything else. Akihiko blinks at her with red eyes.  

“When was the last time you slept,” he murmurs. Mitsuru shrugs in reply and yawns against his hair.

The last thing she remembers before the alarm wakes her is Akihiko twisting a ringlet of her hair around his finger, absently, saying “you changed your shampoo.” The first thing she sees is Akihiko leaving the room in the grey of early morning, ready to run himself down.

“Amada’s plane gets in at ten,” she reminds him, and he nods once, quick and sharp in the doorway, and is gone.

*

When Akihiko found out about the suppressants, he raged; because anger is a secondary emotion, because in the midst of a fire they will always tell you panic kills, because for Akihiko his fear was sometimes, oftentimes, interchangeable with his love.

When Akihiko got home from the hospital the first time, the drying blood on his gloves and Amada at his heels, the lowerclassmen avoided him and his grief at high tide. Drowning men pull others down with them. Everyone knows this.

Later, he crouched on the fourth floor landing and cried himself into a panic attack whilst Mitsuru watched and cursed Shinjiro Aragaki, cursed him because boys with martyr streaks always leave someone behind to clear up the bones. She cursed him and his kind eyes and how he had always been able to snap Akihiko out of this before he left them, left Mitsuru, without any of that old blood brother magic. After all, her hands were just red.

*

Ken is almost unrecognisable. He wears his prep school uniform blazer over a striped t-shirt and chinos; he’s begun a new growth spurt; his phone has a solitary photobooth sticker. It’s of him and Arisato. Wisely, no one chooses to comment: Ken deserves to have the same thing most kids do, puppy love, crushes on the upperclassmen, sweets and fireworks and goldfish from the school festival. If you got good shit back for what you suffered - if the world was fair - things would’ve been different, Mitsuru muses. If you got good shit back for what you suffered, when Mitsuru still saw Arisato out of the corner of her eyes, hunched over their MP3 player, they’d actually be there looking through the fridge like Mitsuru imagined them. They are not there when Mitsuru imagines them, though, so Mitsuru watches Junpei make fun of Ken’s hair, watches Aigis pick up all of Ken’s bags and make him blush, wonders if Yukari plans on ever answering any of her calls. She watches Ken hesitantly approach Akihiko, eyes huge and unsure, watches Akihiko hug him and watches Ken reel with it. Wisely, no one chooses to comment. Ken deserves to have the same thing most kids do, puppy love, crushes on the upperclassmen, for the objects of his pre-teen daydreams to be kind to him. Ken deserves care.

Mitsuru watches Ken crouch down for Koromaru, and feels the years slide back. She hasn’t worn a pleated skirt in years and yet she feels the memory of it crisp against her thighs. When she closes her eyes, the inside of her eyelids flashes scarlet like an old armband. Aigis takes her hand and she takes a breath. She does not think about the six months she spent with Yukari in Barcelona. She does not think of why Yukari is not here. She does not think about what Arisato would say in this moment.

“Shall we go to Hagakure?” she asks. “My treat.”

In short, she does not broker with ghosts. She has too much of the living to think of today. Aigis takes her hand and Akihiko kisses her cheek and she rolls her eyes and she tells herself she’s forgotten most of her Spanish, anyway. Not that it matters. She does not broker with ghosts.

*

Four weeks later, Shinjiro opens his eyes again.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know a great deal about comas, so I've left the reality of waking someone from one deliberately vague for that reason.


End file.
